Max Cooper - True Under Certain Conditions (official video by Frederik Vanhoutte)

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This was built from the anonymous quote “true under certain conditions”, which drew me in with thoughts about the muddy status of truth in seemingly more places than ever, and the flip side of rigid truth determining processes in logic which could map to audio visual structure.


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Max Cooper:

I found this quote submitted to my website anonymously as part of the On Being album project, and it capture my imagination. Truth is never absolute as the quote states, but dependent on the assumptions we accept as our axioms to build our reasoning upon. But truth does seem to have been downgraded in recent years, sometimes not even seeming relevant. Certainty is loaded as well. There’s a lot going on in there.

Working from that anonymous quote as the starting point led me to aesthetics of rigidity and rule based decision processes. The idea was to set up a basic structure which could have one element shifted to radically change the form, like the components of formal logic shifting to reveal truth or falsehood in a mechanical manner as mirrored in Frederick’s video. I also spoke the word “true” and chopped it into thousands of shifting fragments, which themselves occasionally reform into spoken truth. so if it’s not already obvious, it’s a techno track, no nice melodies this time.

I love how Frederick’s algorithms create self contained worlds, little mountain ranges, lakes and sub-cutaneous cell structures blended together through his pixel growth decision process. We also chatted about how to represent a mechanical truth checking system via 3 vs 4 colour maps but that didn’t pan out exactly, if that’s something you’re working with let me know!


Wblut / Frederik Vanhoutte:

"True Under Certain Conditions", I read in this quote a longing for a logical, stepwise way to assess truth. An algorithmic moral compass, a hope that the rigor of mathematical logic might carve a clean path through the informational wreckage left behind by ambition and power.

The visuals I created retain little of that hope for simplicity. Instead, a shifting, unstable landscape of noise absorbs individual actions, reshaped by the movement of every other element. Each voxel, each discrete moment, seems insignificant on its own. Yet every absence, every chance changes the greater motion fundamentally. Patterns emerge that could not exist without the smallest parts. No single element perceives the whole, yet each one shapes everything.
The truth tables of logic are hidden, silent. They drive the table-based cellular automata, variations on classical automata, weaving their patterns on screen. They are the hidden syntax behind the visuals, the machinery behind the noise. They are the building blocks of the digital code, a construct of strict logic. The underlying geometric substrate is rigid, unyielding. Each cube either exists or doesn’t. True or false. From this binary substrate, infinite variation arises. In some parts, these variations are intentionally nonsensical. Allowed by the system, they display a state that cannot be held by a single element. Apparently coherent shapes are simulaneously rotating in two different directions, are simultaneously showing different views.
It is not accidental that I chose to use a generative art approach for this work. For me, the art of rules, of systems, of interactions, of complexity and emergence, is the art form that most fittingly captures the feeling of being lost in, while at the same time being instrumental to, everything that happens around us.


CREDITS:
Music: “True Under Certain Conditions” - Max Cooper
https://www.instagram.com/maxcooperma...
https://maxcooper.net/


Video: Wblut / Frederik Vanhoutte
Frederik Vanhoutte (@wblut) • Instagram photos and videos
https://winterbloed.be/


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